Hamilton came out from behind his desk to shake Simonson’s hand.
“You understand, Douglas, that I really shall have to write this report? That the entire thing falls on you?”
“I understand, Fraser. And I’m sorry to ask you to do it.”
“You shall have a rest now, at least.”
Simonson tried for a smile. “Well, that’s something.”
Hamilton sighed, sat back down and nodded at the wall map of Malta. “Now we can speak freely, what would you do, if you were in charge of the show? With the strength we have, and the provisions remaining, and the enemy able to parachute in to any location?”
Simonson studied the map. “I think I might ask the men, sir.”
Hamilton blinked. “I certainly never had you as a democrat.”
“I mean I might ask for volunteers. There are some who will surrender, when the chance comes, and it seems useless to require them to fight if they can bear a life in captivity. And there are others who will prefer to resist, even though the outcome is clear. I think we have all been here long enough to know our minds by now.”
“So you would split our force?”
“Into two camps, yes. One to yield, another to hold.”
“And in which of the two camps are you?”
Simonson smiled. “Who knows which takes more courage—to die in battle, or to live in vain? It cuts all of us in two, I suppose.”
Hamilton frowned at the map. “And yet, you see, we are only issued with one island.”
March, 1942
IN THE FIRST BIG
southwesterly of the year the Americans arrived in London. They came with the storm at their backs, up from Southampton in trucks. They ran a muscular breed of convoy, widening the roads where they had to, shrugging off the bombed-out houses with big-chested bulldozers they had shipped with them from Maine. When they reached the capital, though the officers were too good to mention it, they were amazed at how tiny it was. The landmarks were bigger in their photographs. The British themselves were quite small.
“Say that again in your accent,” said a lieutenant who had asked Mary for directions. She did, and it made both of them laugh. To discover that one had an accent was quite unexpected and wonderful.
Mary had seen the column rolling along the Strand, on her way to the Lyceum. The children had already been out watching it, and it was hopeless to imagine that she could teach them on a day like this. She had joined them instead as they stood in a neat line on the pavement, oldest to youngest, waving American flags they had made.
“What’s with all the Negroes, ma’am?” said the lieutenant.
“Oh,” said Mary, “you’ll find that almost everyone in Britain is colored. Didn’t they tell you in your briefing?”
The lieutenant looked at her in perfect bafflement. “No ma’am.”
“Well, I’m surprised. As far as the Scotch border we are as dark as pitch. It’s only north of there that the race is diluted.”
“And you, ma’am?”
“I’m an albino. Oh, don’t look so worried. It’s fine, really it is, once one gets used to the persecution.”
She had the class salute him as he climbed back into the cab of his truck, laughing and shaking his head.
Mary turned to Zachary. “Did you think they’d be like this?”
“I thought they’d be like my father.”
His tender expression, his nonchalance briefly overwhelmed. Mary tried not to smile. Men were empty hats after all, from which rabbits popped only by a learned effort of conjuring.
“Did you think they’d come in white gloves, playing the baby grand?”
“I thought there’d be some black people.”
“Hitler will only fight them in separate units. He’s a snob.”
“Look at all this. Look how many soldiers there are.”
“And all come to save us. I can tell you now how worried I was.”
“We’ll win now, won’t we?” said Zachary.
“All I know is that it’s good not to stand alone anymore. I don’t suppose we could have held out much longer, on our own.”
“And what about you?”
“Oh, I’m hardly alone. I have my friends and my family.” She looked at him. “And I have . . .”
He touched her arm. “If you ever need me, I can come and help. Wherever I am, if you start at the theatre, they can find me.”
She smiled, thinking how sweet it was at his age. “Thank you,” she said, “but I’ll manage. I’m ever so . . .”
She tailed off, noticing how steadily he held her eye. The convoy rolled on. When the next gap in it came, the children would cross back to the theater side of the street and she would stay on her own. She realized this was understood now. The convoy would continue and she would not. The true moments of one’s life were sadder for the fact that they must always be synchronized with the ordinary: with rail timetables, with breaks in the traffic.
“Well,” she said. “Thank you.”
It came after a few minutes: a letup in the flow. One heard other people’s conversations again, over the engine noise. One looked up and there was the opportunity. There was no time to fuss over it: the children crossed the street while they could. And now the soldiers came again, on and on in their two-ton trucks, blocking her view of her class. The Americans came in a ceaseless river to end the lease of evil on earth. What loads this would impose on the heart everyone was curious to discover, but it was said they carried fuel oil and provisions for two years. Their bulldozers bellowed, and red sparks roared from their stacks. The convoy came without end. The asphalt shrieked and the children cheered. London’s long siege was broken.
The soldiers stood with their feet wide apart in the truck beds, saluting the children smartly. They raised eyebrows at the great mounds of rubble in the streets that the locals were too weary to arrange back into buildings. The Americans were tall men on full rations and it clearly made no sense to them that exhaustion should have the last word in the common language of English. “How come?” Mary heard them yelling to each other, over the noise of the engines. “How come they just left it broken like this?”
April, 1942
AT THE PUBLIC RECORDS
office, on the fourth day of trying, Zachary had found his father’s name. He hadn’t asked for help and he hadn’t wanted it.
Now the rain came in with the wind. There was an avenue of chestnut trees and he found the broadest for shelter. There was bright sun between the showers, and the light fell green through the leaves. Jackdaws pecked at the edges of the walkways. They hopped among the headstones, finding the worms the rain had brought up and helping them into the light.
Next to his father’s name, which he had recognized from long familiarity, had been: EHZT NOLNOD CMETYRE. He had frowned at the words in the register: sometimes they could be made compliant. He had tried looking from the corner of his eye, then surprising them. EZTA NALDON MCFETRY.
The rain would soon blow through. On the graves the jackdaws fussed at the moss that grew through the gravel. Zachary lit a cigarette. He had waited for a rainy day, to be here alone.
EATS NNLDNN CEMTHGY. He had drawn his thumbs together, isolating each letter as Mary had shown him. He had made a one-letter prison between his thumbs and slid it across the first word: E . . . A . . . S . . . T. He had repeated the word to himself, then interrogated the whole sentence. EAST LONDON CEMETERY. Beside the location had been written a plot number for a mass grave.
The rain stopped. Water dripped from the chestnut leaves, the city inverted in each drop. Zachary came from under the tree and walked among the numbered plots at the margins of the graveyard. There was so much freshly dug earth. Weeds would take before grass.
His father’s plot was marked with a two-inch metal plaque on a wooden stave. The plot was twenty feet by ten, its boundary made with stakes and green twine. One didn’t know how many were buried there. Zachary stood for a while. Dandelions covered the plot. There was a smell of wet earth.
“I’m sorry it took me so long,” he said.
In the footlights his father had addressed the audience at the close of every show:
For those who couldn’t be with us tonight
.
Zachary smiled, and flicked away his cigarette. He could start now. He would try south, across the Thames. There was a rumor that his kind was trying there. Flat rubble waited for them on the far bank of the river. Rubble to build on was no one’s business but their own. It did not catch the light, having no promise but what they brought with them.
He tried not to be afraid. London was a lightening of the sky. It was the bloody last hour of a milk tooth. It was a city dying to begin.
May, 1942
HILDA POURED TEA, PROPPED
an elbow on her kitchen table, and read Simonson’s note again.
It was brave of you to include your photograph in the last letter. What a terrible mess—you must be devastated. That pompadour will have to go. As for the scars, I do not see what you are fretting about—one hardly notices them. In any case, it is only your face—this is why we were all issued with two.
She held the aerogramme to her cheek. It smelled of smoke and mail sacks. Through the open window, pigeons were cooing in that emollient, slightly medical way they had, as if it were a purgative for something nonspecific.
Having no photograph to hand, Simonson had drawn her a self-portrait in blue ink. He had made himself scrawny and bearded, more castaway than soldier. In his cartoon he wore sergeant’s stripes and bawled at men on parade. Hilda thought it adorable that he was so touchy about his demotion. She resolved to sew him various insignia, denoting ranks of her invention, which she would include in subsequent letters.
You write that it was clever of Alistair to induce the two of us to correspond, but I do not think him bright. It will have been no more than simple visual association on his part, since you are rather pretty and I am strikingly handsome. I should also like to correct any lies with which he might have supplied you. He may claim that I correspond with several girls, while in fact I only have ink for you.
Hilda smiled. Well, and so what if the man wrote around? She thought his letters reckless and sweet, as unworn as London in May.
Through the window the traffic rumbled. On the street, beneath the barrage balloons, couples finished each other’s thoughts again. Strapped shoes had been brought out for the season, hems raised by an inch and a half. The capital had remembered itself. She closed her eyes and breathed in the smell of his letter. How good it would be to fall in love—how perfectly, anciently new.
June, 1942
“YES BUT I’M LIKE
a piano,” said Hilda. “I need men to move me.”
“And Simonson?” said Mary.
“I like the convenience of mail-order.”
They were at the Ritz, at a table where they could be seen from the door. Mary spread her hands on the pristine tablecloth. “But there’s always some problem with the delivery, isn’t there? Oh, why do I feel so anxious?”
“Insufficient drink,” said Hilda, snapping her fingers the instant her diagnosis was made. Two more gin fizzes appeared.
“Thank you for coming out,” said Mary. “I know it’s silly, but I couldn’t wait for him on my own.”
She brushed away ash where it had missed the ashtray, and moved the flowers in their vase to catch the light from the chandelier at the center of the room.
“Did he say when he would come?” said Hilda.
“Straight from Waterloo, off the nine o’clock.”
“Any minute, then. Do stop fussing, or I shall have the waiter etherize you.”
“I just want everything to be perfect when he gets here. After all this, I couldn’t bear for him to be put off by a little thing.”
“He didn’t mind when I told him you were a wreck. I shouldn’t think he’ll mind ash on the tablecloth.”
“You’re quite right,” said Mary, thinking that Hilda was quite wrong. The heart was a bicameral thing, both stoical and skittish. Who was to say that it mightn’t endure the years of separation and the abrupt reversals of fate, only to be repulsed by a misaligned vase, by a lipsticked tooth, by a hundredth of an ounce of ash?
“I’ve been meaning to ask,” said Hilda. “Where did you get that hat?”
“White’s, in Burlington Arcade. Do you like it?”
“I actually think I must eat it.”
“Thank you,” said Mary. “The feathers are real phoenix, you know.”
“And your dress is just right. Any more décolletage and you’d look rather as if you might; any less and you’d look as if you might rather not.”
When Hilda was on form she was hard to resist—and in any case it was fun to be back at the Ritz, which seemed to have excused Mary sooner than her family had. Here they honored one’s name in that generous way the Ritz knew, which was to remember it only when one was sober. Seated at the grand, the pianist played some Schumann.
Mary began to believe that everything really might be all right. Since Alistair’s exoneration they had exchanged letters almost weekly while he waited for a convoy home. Her letters were full of apology, his of understanding. She had confessed to passing up the chance to have her father write a letter that might have reduced his sentence.
But if you hadn’t your ideals,
he’d written,
you’d be no different from the others, sipping champagne at Black’s
. For his part Alistair found it hard to believe that she did not despise him for jumping the evacuation queue. But perhaps this was love, at the second time of asking: the understanding that each would not mind what had been necessary locally.
In the light of the chandelier, men in lounge suits converged on their table in oblique trajectories described by the pull of desire and the push of manners. They noticed Hilda’s face when they were already too close, and swerved. Some had prepared opening gambits that they swallowed. Others made attempts of varying skill to demonstrate that they had only been on their way to the men’s room.
Hilda looked into a third gin. “This will be my whole life, you know.”
“You mustn’t think that.”
“It’s hard to stay gay, though. Do they imagine I’m cut all the way through?”